In 1883, a thirty-seven year old newspaperman had a new idea. Charles Henry Browning was an agent for the New York Herald in Philadelphia and lived with his uncle J. K. Walker, a wholesale druggist, at 1632 Spruce Street.[1] His youth had been marked by trauma: in 1850, at the age of four, he had lost his father, Robert Lewright Browning, a lieutenant in the American navy, when he was drowned in Trinidad Bay off the coast of California. The tragedy was re-enacted with eerie precision a decade later when Charles’s brother, also named Robert Lewright, was on the U.S. sloop Levant when it was lost in the Pacific Ocean in 1860.[2] What the young Browning made of these twin deaths is unknown, but what is known is that twenty years later he struck out into a field far more rarified than journalism: he became a genealogist. Browning was not just any genealogist. He specialised in tracing royal descents for the Gilded Age magnates of the American East Coast and in 1883 he published the first fruits of his research, a volume simply entitled Americans of Royal Descent.

Browning himself was oddly absent from this and subsequent books, tersely warning in a prefatory ‘advertisement’ that: The compiler of this collection of genealogies of American Families traced to Kings, wishes it distinctly understood that he holds himself responsible for only the accuracy of their transcriptions, as they have been reproduced from recognized authorities; from privately printed family histories, and information supplied in manuscript by the families themselves, and appearing in a genealogy of his mother’s family simply as “Charles Henry Browning, of Philadelphia, Pa.” His initial one hundred and twenty copy print-run must have been successful, for a second edition appeared in 1891, this time entitled Americans of Royal Descent: A Collection of Genealogies of American Families Whose Lineage is Traced to the Legitimate Issue of Kings (no bastards here). In 1898 these were supplemented with The Magna Charta Barons and their American Descendants, whose faux-blackletter title-page still embodies the social and cultural pretensions of fin-de-siècle American society:

Browning is not much remembered now, or, if he is, it’s only to be reviled as the author of the famously inaccurate Welsh Settlement of Pennsylvania (Philadelphia, 1912). His archives lie, hopefully not mouldering but certainly unread, in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress. But he started something that’s still with us today: the intense, unique, and sometimes baffling fascination that American genealogists have for “royal descents”.[3] After Browning came a host of publications on the same topic. Frederick Lewis Weis’s Ancestral Roots and Magna Charta Sureties were, in many ways, updated versions of Browning’s two works and went through many editions between the first publication of Ancestral Roots in 1950 and its – so far – final incarnation (edited, after Weis’s death, by Walter Lee Sheppard) in 2004. Since then Gary Boyd Roberts has produced two editions of a compendium of these descents, The Royal Descents of 500 (later 600) Immigrants to the American Colonies or the United States (1993-2004) and is working on a third, while Douglas Richardson’s Plantagenet Ancestry (2004) and Magna Carta Ancestry (2005) continue both the tradition and the topical division begun by Browning in 1883 into the twenty-first century. The major genealogical journals regularly publish articles on newly discovered descents from royalty for early American immigrants and regular readers of soc.genealogy.medieval will be familiar with the controversy and, at times, acrimony, which can surround discussions of the validity or lack thereof of these pedigrees. To observe the phenomenon is one thing, to understand it another, and I don’t pretend to do so. When it began in Browning’s Main Line Philly it seems to have been about aggrandisement, about a class of nouveau riche proving that they had the pedigrees to go with their money and were the match for any old world aristocrats they happened to come across (whether the old world aristocrats cared is another story). Now, though, in its popularity across social strata in America it seems to be about something else and I wonder if it’s continuation into the modern era might have something to do with another American fixation which Europeans are especially apt to comment on: the determination with which we hang onto immigrant ethnic identities long after we’ve been stirred into the deracinating melting pot of American culture. I wonder if royal descents, like claims to being Irish, German, or Italian when our parents and grandparents were born in Chicago or New York or Philadelphia, are part of an American attempt to reach back to the European past and make a connection with their increasingly shadowy origins.What do you think? I’d love to see comments from Americans who have proven royal descents for themselves. What motivated you to undertake the – let’s face it – remarkably time-consuming research to study this sort of pedigree? What about it interests or fascinates you?

[1] 1880 U.S. Census, Philadelphia, Philadelphia County, Pennsylvania, E.D. 127, page 180C, enumerated 5 June by Edward J. Aledo, 118-165, 1632 Spruce Street. [2] Browning Family Papers, Finding Aid, Library of Congress; Charles H. Browning, Americans of Royal Descent (Philadelphia, 1883), 17.[3] A parallel publication appeared in England in the same year: the first fascicle of the genealogical entrepreneur Joseph Foster’s The Royal Lineage of Our Noble and Gentle Families (London, 1883). Neither refers to the other and whether there was, indeed, some reciprocal influence or they simply represent the Zeitgeist of their Age remains unexplained. We Moderns, however, may at least be entertained to see the royal descent (from Edward III) of the historian Hugh Trevor-Roper on page 90 of Foster’s work.

About 25 years ago I was sent a large packet of genealogical materials about my mother's family by my godfather, her cousin, even though I did not know him and had not seen him since the day of my baptism as an infant. Much of it turned out to be garbled, but it got me interested in pursuing the family history. There was no mention of royal descent and the compiler did not seem to know very much about the family lines in Europe. My mother's great-grandmother had the surname "Butler". I sent a query to the Butler Society based on an essay written by a relative long dead when I was born and was answered by Hubert Butler and, later, by Patrick Butler, then Lord Dunboyne. They told me that my "Butler" was part of the Dunboyne line, as well as Ormond and Mountgarret. I learned of a royal descent then for the first time, something new for everyone in my family (Edward I). I never set out specifically looking for a royal descent but it was there anyway. As the years went on, I learned of others, including a descent along another of my mother's lines from James IV of Scotland. These, of course, led to others. Since then I have found descents from Edward III, etc. If I can answer at least one of the genealogical puzzles currently on my radar, there may be a Tudor descent as well. My search is for the information and royal descents are lucky finds because so much of the work has already been done. The most difficult and time consuming part of the research is on the non-royal, non-noble, more recent generations and that is where almost all of my focus is.
So to answer the question, I stumbled on the information in the course of researching my family. Obviously no one is interested in hearing about royal or any other sort of descent that does not concern them, so the search is a lonely one. I do not specifically look for royal or noble connections and, in fact, would like to find more on the farmers and tradespeople that are so much more difficult to find.

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Leo van de Pas

11/11/2013 07:02:44

Mankind are a curious species, they want to know how something works, where it came from and so many more things. At the time of Browning the beginnings of Caucasians in Northern America was not within living memory, but not far from it. And so the emerging thoughts "where did those pioneers come from" "how did it all start?" are not so strange. At the same time in Europe, those thoughts would be totally useless as a span of 1800/1900 years is too long to think "how did it all start, where did those pioneers come from. The over 200 years in Browning's time, made it possible to entertain those thoughts and, thank goodness, others have continued these thoughts and the work that goes with it.

Weil analyzes American's motivations for seeking their roots. He might have something to say on the matter: http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674045835

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Kelsey Jackson Williams

5/12/2013 20:55:23

I've heard about Weil's book, but have yet to read it. You're right, though, that it sounds like the sort of thing it might mention. Thanks for the tip!

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Vivien Martin

13/10/2014 03:05:14

I knew my Canadian ancestors were historically significant but until I was prompted by a professional genealogist to look into my family history I had had no interest in doing so. I became fascinated by both them and the history of the time and have continued to be so ever since.
I found first my royal descent by accident.. by researching a matrilineal line ...I was not expecting nor looking for connections to royalty or the aristocracy.

Like others, I stumbled into the world of aristocratic ancestors first by discovering lines to gateway ancestors. This was close to 50 years ago, when everything was through books. I became familiar with Weis' Magna Carta Sureties, etc. Later, tracing my maternal grandmother's paternal line, having forgotten the oral tradition she had heard of a Scottish castle, I made a link to a Scottish family very powerful during the 17th century, and I learned my way through the published peerages and the source records, like the Register of the Great Seal, Privy Council, and the early "club" publications. One of the appeals of this kind of research for me was that I had access to a major university library that had most of these Scottish sources. So, for me, it is mostly the pleasure of breaking through brick walls and looking at little-read antiquarian sources. Now it's become different, with all the digital stuff available.

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Dale Halliday

12/3/2015 06:31:35

I am curious about how we are all connected. I think it can break down some prejudices to know that we are all cousins.